Optimizing for Datacenter Power System Efficiency and Reduced Energy Costs

To the consumer a datacenter is just another pipe in the cloud, a conduit for their data and experiences. However, to the industry giants wringing real dollars (in the form of demographic studies, transactional charges, and raw click-based advertising) a datacenter is the backbone of their business operations. Just like the assembly lines of Ford and the coke furnaces of Carnegie, the most efficient (least cost to operate) datacenter provides the greatest set of financial and operational benefits to their owners.

Datacenter designers and suppliers have known that a major cost contributor is the power needed to run all the electronics; servers, switches, storage. What makes power efficiency so critical to datacenter operations is that datacenters have to pay for it twice.

As an input from a utility provider and/or the on-going cost of harvesting it from the environment themselves using green technologies.

As an output from their equipment, the thermal waste of their operations (the inefficiencies of their electronics) must be removed from the equipment. Sometimes this can be reclaimed but not without the added cost of additional equipment.

No wonder datacenters continue to focus on creating more efficient equipment to reduce costs.

Vicor has announced its certification with Intel’s VR 12.5 voltage regulation specification. Using Vicor’s proprietary ZVS topology and pioneering ChiP (Converter housed in Package) technology, the VR12.5 solution uses 30% less board area and has 30% less losses than Vicor’s existing, industry leading VR12.0 solution. Lower losses in less area translate directly into a more efficient system, and thus a lower cost to operate. Combined with one of Intel’s latest generation Haswell processors, designers can create a system with unmatched efficiency for their future and existing datacenters.